In “Nacho Libre,” rotund comic Jack Black plays a Mexican monk with a secret passion for Lucha Libre, a brand of wrestling that makes its American counterpart seem bland. Of course, Mr. Black is Caucasian, but hipster director Jared Hess pays some penance by casting the rest of the flick with Latino actors of all shapes and sizes.

Being a Texan with a Mexican-American mother, I wasn’t as upset as I thought I’d be that a well-known gringo was attacked with shoe polish in the film. The movie’s sweetness, humanity, and obvious affection for its location, coupled with an ethically appropriate supporting cast, allowed me to sit back, abandon my political correctness, and laugh at a flatulence-heavy tale of dreams deferred and earned.

But it hasn’t always been so easy. Hollywood is notorious for its history of ethnic stereotyping, from the cultural grotesquerie of “blackface,” to Mickey Rooney’s bucktoothed Asian neighbor with the inability to pronounce the letter “R” in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” Who knows whether it was institutional racism or necessity that forced untold directors of Golden Age Westerns to cast legions of white guys as “injuns.” Possibly both. Regardless, through the years, the movie industry has paid for its sins, either with stunning movies about race such as “Do the Right Thing” or by rewarding the over-hyped treacle “Crash” with an Academy Award.

When it comes to Latinos, however, Hollywood has been less diligent. Years before the civil rights movement took hold, Hollywood filmmakers had begun to release African- Americans from the prison of cartoonish cliche. Slowly, from Hattie McDaniel’s Academy Award-winning role as Mammy in “Gone With the Wind” all the way up to Sidney Poitier’s Oscar for “Lilies of the Field,” African-American actors were able to fight for their place among Tinseltown’s best. And rightfully so.

But Hispanic actors have had a more difficult time. Partly because it was so easy to dust a white actor with cocoa dust and call him Latino. Charlton Heston starred as a Mexican narcotics cop in the classic noir “Touch of Evil.” Eli Wallach played the sniveling bandito Ugly in the great spaghetti Western “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” More recently, Brian DePalma’s homage to 1980s excess “Scarface” featured Al Pacino, who played Cubano Tony Montana with equal parts Al Jolson and Ricky Ricardo. In the gay farce “The Birdcage,” Hank Azaria does double duty, playing a flamboyant Ecuadorian.

That such acts of racial masquerading don’t inspire accusations of minstrelism suggest an uneasy symbiosis between America and Mexico, one that we see played out in the hot button immigration issue. As it was explained to me as a kid, my 19th-century ancestors on my mother’s side went to bed in Mexico and woke up in Texas. Our cultures are more intimate than most want to admit nowadays, which makes it a bit easier to paint up a white guy and pass him off as a South Of the Border citizen. As for “Nacho Libre,” you can’t begrudge a studio for wanting to stack a children’s film with a bankable star. If Hollywood continues to evolve, hopefully we can look forward to a future remake of “The Ice Storm,” starring Carlos Mencia as a sexually repressed WASP from Connecticut.